Friday, February 28, 2014

No one on the right could think like this--defeated, embarrassed and taking masochistic delight in being "chastened":

This year’s annual Aipac conference, running from March 2-4 in Washington DC, will differ from usual. Most years the conference is an exercise in celebration and display of power - but this year, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is both institutionally chastened and at an inflection point in the US-Israel relationship.

Arguably America’s foremost lobbying group of the past half century, Aipac has rarely lost a political battle. This year’s conference comes after a year in which its smaller rival, JStreet, won cautious gains and Aipac suffered two political defeats: its failed push for increased sanctions on Iran and its fruitless call for US military intervention in Syria.

With Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu charting a rightward course that alienates not only much of the world and the Obama government, but also the American Jewish community, Aipac faces a major challenge as Secretary of State John Kerry conducts his peace diplomacy.

Despite these anxieties, the conference will welcome up to 14,000 participants to hear Mr Kerry on Monday and Mr Netanyahu on Tuesday. Senior Jewish members of the two major parties will speak: Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew, as well as grandees such as Joe Lieberman and John McCain...

Something tells me that Cantor, at least, won't be nearly as "chastened" as the author of these spineless, spiteful remarks would like him to be. As for John Kerry's "peace diplomacy"--I wouldn't give you so much as a plugged shekel for it (or, for that matter, for much of America's "alienated" and pathologically leftist Jewry).

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the most effective way of dealing with Zionhass is by delegitimizing the delegitimizers. That is, by exposing who these loathers are and what's behind their loathing. This article on the Algemeiner site shows how it's done:

As Amnesty International published an anonymous 85-page report condemning Israel on Thursday, NGO Monitor, the Jerusalem-based charity watchdog, highlighted the backgrounds of Amnesty’s researchers, several of whom were full-time anti-Israel activists before joining the human rights group.

Anne Herzberg, NGO Monitor’s international legal counsel, told The Algemeiner on Thursday, “We are not sure who wrote the report because Amnesty doesn’t say — in violation of NGO fact-finding guidelines established by the International Bar Association.”

The only name associated with the report, on its press release, was Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International, who has managed to leave few footprints anywhere online; even Luther’s public LinkedIn profile provides little clue to his experience or credentials.

AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming--a.k.a. da humans gone and done it!] is a scam. There is no credible scientific evidence to show any change in the global pattern of normal climate fluctuation over the centuries, and nothing to tie this non-existent change to increases in carbon dioxide. The global climate has been flat-lining for more than a decade while carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise.

Contrary to the myth-makers, there are many hundreds of eminent scientists who say the AGW theory is wholly without foundation. The so-called ‘evidence’ for AGW, some of which has been shown to be an outright fraud, has been mostly produced by dodgy computer modelling based on dodgy data producing dodgy predictions which are an affront to science. It is produced by researchers who are either ideological zealots for whom the actual evidence of declining global temperatures has to be hidden; who know that grant-funding or professional advancement is conditional upon their ‘research’ producing conclusions that support AGW theory; or who are third-rate minds who go along with either or both of the above without even realising what’s happening...

Now, that's what I call an effective slapshot. (She shoots; she scores!)

The online petition to have the video removed from Youtube is now garnering support all over the world.

It calls on people from inside and outside Islam to condemn the video and have it discredited as blasphemous.

I endured Perry’s video several times without even seeing the piece of jewelry that is supposed to be offensive to Muslims.

But, of course, I am a moderate Muslim and thus needed to look again … and again...

I'm sure plenty of the affronted have endured repeat viewings, too--the better to fuel their outrage such that it leads to that endorphin rush of uncontrolled hysteria. And the better to cow us--and try to control us.

The "myths" it supposedly shatters are that chicks wear the veil because they're forced to and/or because they're uneducated. In fact, says the report, neither is the case.What I found most interesting--and most disturbing--about the study (it would have been my lede, had I been the CTV reporter): it reveals that most of these women did not wear the face covering back in their home countries but took up the veil only after arriving in Canada. In other words, they became more devout, and more visibly Muslim, in a democracy where chicks and men are equal under the law.Call it the melting pot in reverse (which, when you think about it, is what multiculturalism is really all about).

Dr. Clarke has also worked with Muslim activists and the Ontario Law Society to produce a Muslim Marriage Contract Kit (2010, available in French as Trousse de Contrat de mariage musulman) designed to address issues with the private use of Islamic law in the West, and she continues to consult and hold workshops for women's groups across the country on this subject.

I'm shocked--shocked!--that a woman who believes in the sharia way of marriage would have positive things to say about wearing the niqab. Just kidding. Actually, I would have been shocked had she been able to keep her apparent biases out of the report.FYI, the Canadian Council of Muslim Women press release makes no mention of "my" lede, but it does point out that we, the Ontario taxpayers, paid for the niqab study via the province's Trillium Foundation.Update:The Trillium website reveals that the CCMW received

$191,000 over two years to conduct research with Muslim women who wear the hijab or niqab to increase understanding of why Canadian Muslim women choose to wear the veil and what that means in a Canadian context in order to support civic engagement and better inform service provision.

“It was really the right time to green the Oscars. Certainly with Al Gore’sAn Inconvenient Truth being nominated [in 2007]. It was great. He won an Oscar before he won the Nobel Peace Prize, so the effect of the message of environmental sustainability that came out of the Oscars was huge! I mean, there’s Leonardo DiCaprio showing up in a hybrid. All that affected the American consciousness. Suddenly, it became cool to be green,” said actor and environmental advocate Ed Begley Jr. in a discussion with Gale Anne Hurd, CEO and producer of Valhalla Entertainment.

That same year, Leonardo DiCaprio - an NRDC trustee and nominee for Best Actor – said that “For the first time in the history of the Oscars, environmentally intelligent practices have been thoughtfully integrated into the planning of tonight’s event to make our world healthier and help combat the threat of global warming.”

Joining the conversation with Hurd and Begley Jr., senior scientist at the NRDC Allen Hershkowitz says that he remembers “the first year we changed the toilet paper. And we had these little framed FSC [Forest Stewardship Council] statements in the bathrooms. I stood there watching Jack Nicholson washing his hands and reading our sign.”

Begley, says that everything at the Oscars is sustainable: “[t}here is nothing that is disposable—from the cloth napkins and tablecloths to the plates and cutlery. I’m vegan, and [eating’s] never been a problem for me. It’s one of the greenest galas I’ve ever been to.”...

Now, if only they could find a way to harness all the hot air in room, they'd have a "green" fuel source that would last as long as there's a Hollywood.

We learn via the NatPo's Chris Selley that Heather Mallick, for one (and she may be the only one), didn't think Justin Trudeau was endeavoring to be witty (always a bad move for him) with his Russia-Ukraine-hockey quip. Mallick, who says she's a Trudeau "partisan" and finds him "sophisticated" (now, that's funny!) insists, in all seriousness, that what he was doing was assessing the situation on the ground:

“It isn’t even that Trudeau made a joke that went wrong, it’s that it wasn’t a joke or even a witticism, it was such a general statement that it scarcely qualified as a remark,” she writes. “Trudeau meant that Yanukovych was in trouble … , the Russians had indeed been desperate for their $60-billion Sochi ghost town to produce hockey medals, that status-anxiety makes them brutal.”

What absolute twaddle. That’s empirically not what Trudeau was saying. We know that not from his subsequent mea culpa, but because mere seconds after he said it, he described it as “an attempt to bring a light view of [the] situation” (our italics).

Well, he did succeed in doing that. People are laughing like crazy--at yet another Trudeau faux pas. You can, however, exclude NatPo deep thinker Andrew Coyne from that throng. In what is perhaps the biggest joke of all, Coyne sees a Liberal leader who "is in total control."Wishful thinking much, Andrew?

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Why would the DL, an icon of the left, want to hang out with the rich knuckle-draggers of the American Enterprise Institute? That's a question that David Rose, writing on the Vanity Fair site, has an awfully hard time figuring out:

[P]erhaps the most surprising thing about the Dalai Lama’s sojourn at the A.E.I., which took place at its downtown 17th Street headquarters on February 19 and 20, was that the relationship between spiritual leader and think tank began at his behest, not A.E.I.’s. In the very days last autumn, as Congressional Republicans were charging down the political blind alley of the government shutdown, Pletka and A.E.I.’s president, Arthur Brooks, were meditating with His Holiness at his base in Dharmsala, India, in the Himalayas. They were there at his invitation, which had been conveyed through mutual contacts at Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-government-funded broadcaster.

There was something, it seemed, about the A.E.I.’s message under Brooks’s leadership that had prompted the Dalai Lama to reach out. Part of it, I later learned, was Brooks’s assertion that the ultimate goal of public policy should be to maximize human happiness, not material wealth. Indeed, the title of one of Brooks’s books, published in 2008, is Gross National Happiness—a phrase that is also employed as the official metric of prosperity espoused by the rulers of the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan.

Meanwhile, Brooks has been spending a lot of time trying to develop what George W. Bush once termed “compassionate conservatism.” Brooks believes that the only way the American right can regain both moral stature and political energy is to prove itself more effective at eliminating poverty than the left has been. Conservatives, he says, need to be able to go to bed each night knowing they did something that day to help the poor.

It need hardly be said that compassion has always been the human quality preached most insistently by His Holiness. It extends even to the people of China, which has occupied his country, often brutally, since 1951. To illustrate the point, he likes to recall a conversation he had with a monk who had been a political prisoner in a Chinese labor camp for 18 years, and told how this had exposed him to danger—not physical peril, but “the danger of losing my compassion for the Chinese.”

“Strictly speaking, I am socialist,” he told me in our interview, “so I am leftist. Some people say, this organization [the A.E.I.], is more rightist.” But that did not preclude a dialogue: “I have a very good impression [of Brooks], so therefore I accept his invitation. I felt, rightist also human being . . . Their main purpose is how to build happy society. So it doesn’t matter.”

Nor did he plan to try to convert A.E.I. and its wealthy business donors—some of whom were attending the A.E.I. event—to socialism: “No, no, no. They have own way of thinking. Their own way of belief. The important thing is, I am Buddhist, but I should never restrict my talking to Buddhists: totally wrong. So you have your own view, your own way of thinking: O.K., then that way you make a contribution.

“I have many friends among both parties, from Republicans and from Democrats . . . The most important thing is oneness of humanity. America is [the] leading nation of free world. American principles, democracy, liberty: right now these things [are] very important.”...

Wow. It's truly shocking to consider that the Dalai Lama, an avowed socialist, "gets" the American ethos of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness far better than most Democrats--including Barack Obama--do.

It’s no accident that “Israel Apartheid Week,” an annual two-week extravaganza that began this week, focuses on Western college campuses. It’s not just because that’s where young, impressionable future leaders can be found. It’s also because, as a new study reveals, the educated mainstream is the mainstay of good old-fashioned anti-Semitism in today’s West. That counterintuitive finding explains why college campuses are such fertile ground for attacks on the Jewish state.

Prof. Monika Schwarz-Friesel of the Technical University of Berlin reached this conclusion after studying 10 years’ worth of hate mail–14,000 letters, emails, and faxes in all–sent to the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Israeli embassy in Berlin. In an interview published in Haaretz yesterday, she said she fully expected to discover that most of it came from right-wing extremists. But in fact, right-wing extremists accounted for a mere 3 percent, while over 60 percent came from educated members of “the social mainstream – professors, Ph.Ds, lawyers, priests, university and high-school students,” she said. Nor were there any significant differences between right-wing extremists’ letters and those of the educated mainstream, Schwarz-Friesel said: “The difference is only in the style and the rhetoric, but the ideas are the same.”...

Ineed. And today's youth have been indoctrinated to believe that climate change "deniers" and Zionists are the alpha and omega of global eeeville while ObamaCare is the apex of goodliness.

Justin Trudeau has to do something about his sense of humour. Though he made clear he was just kibbitzing, the spat over his hockey joke about Vladimir Putin and the Ukraine created a commotion he didn’t need. It took away from his showing at the Liberal Party convention which was given high grades from media pundits and other observers. Where he scored was not on policy but rather on style and tone.

In contrast to the adolescent partisanship of his governing rivals, Mr. Trudeau came across as seasoned and good-natured. He toyed with his opponents, joking about how he drives them “nutty.” At another point he reached out to Conservative voters, suggesting that they are good people who, in contrast to their leader, don’t like seeing politics reduced to smears and non-stop attack ads.

His biggest applause line was not about policy, but character. “Negativity,” Mr. Trudeau asserted, “cannot be this this country’s lifeblood.”...

It can't? That being so, I guess there will be no profane "negativity" from "stylish" Justin any more.As for the notion that Harper and Co. are "nutty" and "adolescent": what Martin is doing is projecting Justin's obvious jejunosity onto the sober-sided grownups (who have much meat but little sizzle). "A" for effort there, Larry. Martin is right about one thing, though. Callow Justin is all sizzle--and that's what the Liberals are selling. Hey, it worked for Obama, right?

It wasn't unusual for Israeli physician Baruch Goldstein to pray at the Tomb of Abraham in the West Bank town of Hebron, and it was normal for a settler like him to carry his submachine gun. So Israeli guards didn't bat an eye when Goldstein strode past them. Muslims that day were marking the holy month of Ramadan...in their mosque next to the tomb, while Israelis in the adjacent room celebrated the feast of Purim, which recalls Jews escaping a death sentence in ancient Persia. Goldstein was on a Purim mission of his own. A disciple of the anti-Arab rabbi Meir Kahane, he opened fire on the Muslims kneeling before him, killing 29 and wounding dozens before being beaten to death by survivors. Forty days later, Hamas retaliated with its first suicide bombing, killing eight Israelis in Afula. The peace process has never recovered. -- Patrick White

Actually, the "process" recovered just fine. It's been going like gangbusters ever since. Notice, though, how easy it is for the Zion-loathing to pin the blame for the paucity of peace--as well as for Hamas's explosive martyrdom practices--on the Jews and not on, say, the Koran/the Muslim Brotherhood/the jihad imperative, etc.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

In a case of cross-dressing that not even "human rights" cretin Barbara Hall could condone, a man disguised himself in a burkaso his wife, who had announced her intention to get a divorce and who had already left him, would let down her guard and open her door. He then proceeded to savagely murder her. Re the get up, Tarek Fatah notes that the burka

has become an attire of choice for various crimes, terrorists, and now this is the first time the burka has been used as an instrument to a murder.

Monday, February 24, 2014

Prominent Canadian human rights lawyer Richard Warman provided a dynamic presentation on the topic of hate speech in Canada as the guest speaker at an exclusive Lawyers4Wiesenthal luncheon hosted by Steve Kelman, Partner, Aird & Berlis LLP earlier this month.

The Ottawa-based lawyer shared personal anecdotes about his own experiences dealing with disseminators of hate propaganda and provided a definition of the "hallmarks of hate," - the perimeters within the national criminal code and civil law surrounding the dissemination of hate speech, as well as the complaint process with the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Warman's work has predominantly focused on the worst offenders of the white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements, whose internet forums pose a powerful menace to society in their calls for ethnic cleansing or genocide. "It's the danger of what can come from them and how they are poisoning our communal wells," he explained.

Since 2001, Warman has been the successful complainant in 15 consecutive Internet hate cases, but cautioned: "As with combating all forms of bigotry and defending human rights the world over, the struggle continues."

"Richard Warman's discussion on the legal control of hate speech in Canada was both informative and interesting," noted Mr. Kelman. "He presented material which I find valuable as a professional, and I look forward to future Lawyers4Wiesenthal events."

Silly lawyers. These days our "communal wells" are being poisoned by Zion-loathers of the leftist and Islamist persuasion, and, for reasons of fear and political correctness, no one in the "human rights"/victimist industry is going to protect Jewry from them. Indeed, if you dare point out that, in the words of scholar David Nirenberg, "The Koran is extensively structured as a polemic against the Jews," and that that poses a contemporary threat to Jews-in-the-age-of-Israel that has nothing to do with Nazis, you are apt to be decried--and marginalized--for being "Islamophobic," the "human rights" no-no of our time.But, hey, if you're still concerned about scary Nazis coming back to ship you eastward in cattlecars; if you fret that "It's springtime for Hitler" is more than a song lyric; if you think that the real threat to Jewry is posed by a handful of crackpots nostalgic for WW2 and not by krazy Twelver Khomeinists intent on pulling a Hiroshima on Tel Aviv and environs (which comprises pretty much all of Israel), then Richard Warman and his infallible Third Reich GPS is the man for you!

I was thinking about Justin Trudeau's "fear" message, his promise to banish our "fear" and replace it with--stop me if you've heard this before--H-O-P-E.I don't know about you, but at the moment the only thing I really fear is that callow, foolish Justin Trudeau will become our next prime minister. Or, to put it another way: The only thing we have to fear is the fear of Justin himself.Update: Justin's current message is that Canadians of differing political stripes should strive to be kind and nice to each other. That certainly marks a change from his previous parliamentary M.O., for instance referring to a Conservative cabinet minister as a "piece of sh*t."

The September 11 attacks in the United States were used by the US government as a “pretext” to “declare open warfare on Islam and Muslims,” an American activist says.

“It’s totally illegal what the government is doing,” said Abdul Alim Musa, the director of Masjid Al-Islam in Washington, D.C., criticizing a federal judge’s dismissal of a lawsuit alleging the New York City Police Department illegally spied on Muslim Americans in New Jersey.

On Thursday, the court in Newark in the state of New Jersey ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to show that the NYPD's intelligence unit had discriminated against Muslims by spying on mosques and other locations in the state.

The 2012 lawsuit was the first to challenge the NYPD's spying operations against Muslim groups and individuals in the US. It had accused the police of spying on Muslims at several mosques, restaurants and schools since 2002.

“My belief is it’s a waste of time for Muslims to use all of their energy seeking justice in the United States courts,” Musa told Press TV on Saturday. “The United States court system is totally controlled by American Zionism and they’re not going to allow Muslims to gain any justice in that court system.”...

Spoken like a latter-day Haj Amin al-Husseini, Imam. Not surprisingly, the Imam merits his own entry in Discover the Networks, which details his very busy life here:

Born in Arkansas as Clarence Reams, Musa was raised in Oakland, California during the 1960s, when he embraced the ideology of the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam. According to his As-Sabiqun biography, Musa at that time became a “leading cocaine-exporter in Colombia” and he met exiled Black Panther leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver and Pete O'Neal in Algeria. After returning to the U.S., Musa surrendered to law-enforcement authorities and served some time in prison. While incarcerated, he converted to Islam and took his present name.

During the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, Musa announced his support for Ayatollah Khomeini. Since the early 1980s, Musa has made a number of visits to Iran as a representative of Muslims in the United States and has declared his support for Iran’s “Islamic revival.”...

That's exactly what we non-"progressives" are afraid of, Justin: That, by playing ("HOPE!") on the emotions of voters ("CHANGE!") a la a certain "transformational" hard-leftist to the south, you'll be able to "change" the joint by spending tons more dough and moving away from support for Israel (in other words, change things back to the Liberals' default setting).

Friday, February 21, 2014

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Rizvi's tweet has something to do with this.My response to his seeming non sequitur of an observation: That was then, Iman. Despite the purported brilliance of that long-ago era in Spain (which some of the impudent, the iconoclastic and the saucy continue to rebuke), and as appealing as the idea may sound to you, most of today's Jews would prefer not to live under Islam's yoke.We're kind of funny that way.

Richard Falk, a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, is no stranger to controversy.

On the same day he released his final report to the United Nations that accused Israel of inhuman acts and apartheid, Falk told a crowd at Princeton University’s McCosh Hall that Palestinian nationalism is the “great symbolic struggle of our time.”

Falk was at Princeton Tuesday as the keynote speaker in the annual Edward W. Said Memorial lecture series, which honors the memory of the late Palestinian scholar and political activist.

Throughout the lecture, Falk drew comparisons between alleged Israeli abuses of human rights in the Palestinian territories with South African apartheid. Falk continued the narrative by comparing Said with lauded human rights advocate and South African President Nelson Mandela, as both believed that neither pure violence nor peaceful passiveness would result in a just solution.

“Said accepted the existence of Israel as a reality that Palestinians should not challenge,” said Falk, adding that Palestinians offered territorial concessions in 1988.

Falk outlined the evolution of Israel-Palestinian conflict from Said’s point of view. Said believed that while Palestinians should offer some concessions to Israel, the concessions should not be so trusting that an agreement sacrifices Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

He added that Said and many Palestinians became progressively more disillusioned over Palestine’s long struggle for statehood, because Israel allegedly refused to recognize Palestinian rights and accelerated violations of international law.

“However barbaric the Holocaust, it did not excuse the failing of justice for the Palestinian people, who were fully entitled to live on the land of historic Palestine,” Falk said...

So let me get this straight, Dick. Palestinians should not challenge Israel's reality, yet they are fully entitled to live in "historic Palestine," i.e. Israel. How does that work, exactly?We have come to expect such "subtle" and "nuanced" thinking--lies, more lies, old-fangled blood libels married to modern-day calumnies re "apartheid"--from the likes of Falk and Said (of whom the best that can be said is that he's dead). Even so, it doesn't make them any easier to take.

Back in 2006, a former adviser to Mr. Trudeau’s father, Tom Axworthy, was charged with the Liberal renewal process, after the election loss to the Harper Conservatives. His conclusion was that there is an “implementation gap” between what Liberals promise and deliver. “Liberalism’s dirty secret (and it’s not so secret these days) is that government doesn’t seem to work well much of the time,” he said.

You call it an "implementation gap." I call it "promising the moon--hope 'n' change and all the rest of that marshmallow fluff--so you'll get elected." Granted, mine isn't quite as succinct, but it does describe "Liberalism's dirty secret"--for gaining power. The fact that, once securely installed in the driver's seat, these folks can't come through on their promises isn't a function of "government" not working. It's indicative of the left's fundamentally unsound way of thinking, the way it perceives--or rather, misperceives--what government can and should do.

According to the National Post, microaggression “is an increasingly common term on university campuses ...” When I was in university, students were concerned with a “macroaggression” that was going on at the time — the Vietnam War — and Patty Hearst was running around with her urban guerrilla comrades shouting “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” Patty Hearst is now a 60-year-old widow, by the way, and the mood is quite different on campus. It’s scarier. Instead of protesting big, important stuff like war, today’s unbelievably prissy students are tattling to the authorities because their feelings have been hurt by others’ perfectly innocuous behavior.

Thus McGill University student Brian Farnan got rapped on the knuckles for the sin of microaggression because he reposted a video from the Tonight Show featuring, among other doctored video, President Barack Obama kicking a door open as he left a news conference. It was all part of a joke Farnan was making about mid-term exams, and of the 22,000 people who saw Farnan’s posting, just one complained. However, as a brand new member of the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Offence, Farnan could only achieve absolution by agreeing to subject himself to sensitivity training and issuing an apology because he had “unknowingly perpetuated” the “living legacy” of “people of colour ... being portrayed as violent in contemporary culture.” In fact, the Post reported that Farnan is now busy planning his own ritual bludgeoning, oops, I mean sensitivity training.

The aggression may be "micro" but its effect on the "macro" is dire. To wit: a dearth of common sense and the death of freedom (a good working definition of totalitarianism, no?)﻿﻿﻿
﻿

[t]he Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, commonly known as Haia, has tracked down 735 accounts in the Kingdom on various popular social networking sites including Twitter, Whoshere and Palringo for indulging in immoral activities and violating decent and ethical behavior.

The commission’s IT manager Hassan Ali Al Asiri told local media that it has identified 735 users and has been trying to ascertain their identities with the cooperation of the authorities concerned. The commission, he said, was also monitoring other social media sites as well.

He said that after identifying the users, the commission will guide them on the right path to promote virtue but if they fail to do so, it will block their accounts. And if they keep continue further, it will then refer the cases to the authorities concerned for necessary punitive action.

Hassan Ali Al Asiri said several users of popular social media sites were indulging in blasphemy, promotion of sale of wine, homosexuality, human trafficking, and spreading immorality in the society which needs to be curbed.

Salman Al Qaitani, expert in digital evidence in criminal law, opined that smart phones and close interaction with social networking sites do lead to negative impact on the youth...

Of course he is, because Omar is the titular character of Omar, the Palestinian flick that may get Hollywood's nod for Best Foreign Film at the upcoming Oscars.Whether or not it really is the best among those nominated, at the very least it should get some prize for best anti-Israel propaganda.Is Omar the Jew Suss of our time? In a way. Then again, that flick never garnered an Oscar nomination.

It's a marshmallow world in the courtroomWhen Mike Mann comes to punish Mark Steyn.'Cuz he dared to laughAt Mike's hockey graph And crossed over some "libelous" line.It's a SLAPP-happy day at the court houseAnd for that Dr. Mann must be "thanked."Should you diss his stickHe'll repeat the trick 'Cuz he thinks that his stick's sacrosanct.The climate is changing--see how it goes:Polar bears float on melting ice floes.The climate is changing--raise the alarm!It's man that's doin' the harm.It's a marshmallow time in the U.S.'Cuz free speech is for them, not for you.And if you denyAny climate guyYou will have to recant PDQ.The science is settled,Just so you know.Suzuki has spoken; Al Gore says it's so.The science is settled,The experts agree."Accede!," is what they decree.It's a marshmallow world in the courtroomWhen Mike Mann comes to punish Mark Steyn.And if you dare dissMike's old hockey stickYou, too, may cross a "libelous" line.

Women's lib, holy war-style. Since, unlike the guys, they don't get any afterlife sexy time should they end up becoming "martyrs," that--the ability to fight alongside the menfolk for the sake of Allah--must be what a wannabe shaheeda sees as her payoff.

Here, I'll put it in a sentence: At McGill University, someone who dared poke fun at Obama was declared guilty of "microaggression" and forced to issue a lengthy and abject mea culpa.In other words, pointing to "microaggression" is one method that campus thought police/micro-managers use to beat down those foolish enough to believe there's still such a thing as free speech.

In the latest feat of bureaucratic overreach, the Federal Communications Commission not only wants to set the agenda for the American media (more "social justice" crap, if you please), it wants to place a little FCC overseer in the newsroom to make sure its diktats are being enforced. The FCC has picked an opportune time to advance this idea. During the Obama presidency, the media have become so supine, so lackadaisical, that they barely have a pulse. They are thus unlikely to raise much of a fuss over this latest outrage.And, after all, isn't it better (better for Obama and his control freaks/enforcers, that is) to stress "social justice" issues--stories about victim groups and the like--instead of digging into the manifold disasters of the Obama regime (Benghazi, O-Care, the IRS, the NSA, foreign policy chaos, etc., etc., etc.)?To paraphrase the poet: This is the way free speech ends, not with a bang but an overseer.Update: This bit, from Thomas Sowell's magisterial Intellectuals and Society, is worth quoting here. It is the beginning of Chapter 10, "Filtering Reality":

The preservation of the vision of the anointed [i.e. the vision of the left; the way it perceives itself and its "mission"] has led many among the intelligentsia to vigorous and even desperate expedients, including the filtering out of facts, the redefinition of words and--for some intellectuals--challenging the very idea of truth itself. Many among the intelligentsia create their own reality--whether deliberately or not--by filtering out information contrary to their conception of how the world is or ought to be.

Some have gone even further. J.A. Shumpeter said that the first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie. It is not necessary to lie, however, in order to deceive, when filtering will accomplish the same purpose. This can take the form of reporting selective and atypical samples, suppressing some of the facts altogether, or filtering out the inconvenient meanings or connotations of words.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

In this movie trailer, Freeman even reads from what looks like a Lego tablet (the Ten Commandments kind, not the computer kind). Given the awful kerfuffle about some Danish 'toons, I guess the Lego folks figured it was safer to go with the Jew. ;)Not coming soon: Jews rioting in the streets over "insult" to our prophet.

There are few fuzzier, more zoo-friendly public relations ventures than holding a naming contest for a polar bear cub.

That is, unless the shortlist of names includes a purportedly Inuit word that is not really an Inuit word at all. Then it becomes a small public relations disaster.

The contest, typically a feel-good exercise, descended into controversy late last week when Piita Irniq, former commissioner of Nunavut, detected something amiss with one of the prospective names for the Toronto Zoo’s three-month-old crowd-pleaser.

Searik, included among a half-dozen possibilities, was defined on the zoo’s website as “Inuit for beautiful.”

This left Irniq scratching his head because, as he told the Star, “There’s no meaning, absolutely no meaning to the name.”

“I put it on Facebook and . . . nobody understood what it meant either,” he said. “None of the Inuit who read the post understood what it means.”

Things got worse when Iqaluit-based Nunatsiaq News reported Friday on the zoo’s initial response to the apparent blunder. A spokeswoman told the newspaper the zoo had done research “to confirm the meaning was correct,” and referenced a Wiki Answers page.

“There are lots of knowledgeable Inuit to ask . . . (why) then would a reputable organization like the Toronto Zoo use Wiki Answers as an authoritative source?” one Nunatsiaq commenter wondered.

Others maintained the whole concept of naming a polar bear is out of touch with Inuit culture.

As Minnie Napartuk, an Inuktitut translator at Avataq Cultural Institute, explained, “I don’t think you should name an animal unless they are pets.”...

The city is striking a special community working group to address concerns about a contentious Muslim condominium complex in Thornhill Woods.

"What's going to happen, I would hope, out of this (working group) will be some further insights, information, perhaps even some significant changes that would be made to the application that would come from the agreed upon results of this group's deliberations," Thornhill Councillor Alan Shefman said.

The unusual move by council Tuesday afternoon to establish a working group for this proposed development comes nearly two weeks after hundreds of residents descended on city hall for a public hearing.

They came to air concern about, or voice support for, the Islamic Shia Ithna-Asheri Jamaat of Toronto's proposal to build two 17-storey residential towers, 61 townhouses and retail space on its 11- hectare property at 9000 Bathurst St., south of Rutherford Road.

The new Islamic community would be built around the Jaffari Community Centre...

Let's hope the task force takes this into consideration (although I doubt it will).

What they are, says Bawer, are cogent and purposeful, a manifestation of the POTUS's skewed worldview:

These foreign policy blunders [Russia, Syria, Iran] and numerous others––especially the loss of
critical ally Egypt–– reflect ideological delusions that go beyond Obama. The
notion that aggressors can be tamed and managed with diplomatic engagement has
long been a convenient cover for a political unwillingness to take military
action with all its dangers and risks. Crypto-pacifist Democrats are
particularly fond of the magical thinking that international organizations,
summits, “shuttle diplomacy,” conferences, and other photogenic confabs can
substitute for force.

But progressive talk of “multilateralism” and “diplomatic engagement” hides
something else: the Oliver Stone/Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky/Richard Falk
self-loathing narrative that the United States is a force of evil in the world,
a neo-colonialist, neo-imperialist, predatory capitalist oppressor responsible
for the misery and tyranny afflicting the globe. Given that America’s power is
corrupt, we need a foreign policy of withdrawal, retreat, and apologetic
humility, with our national sovereignty subjected to transnational institutions
like the U.N., the International Court of Justice, and the European Court of
Human Rights ––exactly the program that Obama has been working on for the last 5
years. Given the damage such policies are serially inflicting on our security
and interests, it starts to make sense that inexperience or stupidity is not as
cogent an explanation as enemy action...

In other words, these Pogo "progressives" have met the enemy and it is (the) U.S.

Back in 2008 when Barack Obama first ran for president, one of the many signals he sent to Jewish groups to reassure them of his good will toward Israel and his foreign-policy bona fides was to sever ties with Robert Malley. Malley, a Clinton-era National Security Council staffer, is best known for his stand blaming Israel rather than Yasir Arafat for the collapse of the 2000 Camp David peace summit. His position as an informal advisor to the Obama campaign was a major liability for a candidate desperate to reassure Jewish Democrats that he could be relied upon to maintain the alliance with Israel. But when it became known in May of 2008 that Malley had met with Hamas terrorists, the Obama campaign severed ties with Malley.

It turned out that those who worried that Malley’s presence in the Obama foreign-policy shop was a sign of future trouble with the Jewish state were right. Despite his campaign promises and the fact that he failed to give an inveterate Israel-basher like Malley a job in his administration, President Obama spent most of his first term picking fights with the State of Israel before a reelection-year charm offensive. But now well into his second term, the president is finally rewarding Malley for falling on his sword for him during his first campaign. This afternoon it was announced that Malley is heading back to the White House to serve as a senior director at the National Security Council where he will be tasked with managing relations between the U.S. and its Persian Gulf allies. While we are told the administration is making an effort to bolster its traditional ties to the region, Malley’s appointment sends a very different signal, especially to Israel...

Iran and world powers convened nuclear negotiations in Vienna, with both sides trying to lower expectations of an accord coming out of their meeting this week.

I for one have faith that these cretins will be able to go down, down, down, without much exertion. Heck, they may even end up winning one of those Nobel peace thingies for their efforts.Update:Iran's the Problem--even if Obama and Kerry refuse to admit the obvious.

Risibly--and outrageously--the Alberta "human rights" kangaroos have ruled that foreigners should not be held to the same standards. As might be expected, Ezra Levant, who has had his own run in with that province's ridiculous 'roos, has some thoughts on the issue.

﻿"Palestine Brings Us Together." That's the new slogan on the redesigned Palestine House website. (I guess they decided not to go with the more appropriate and heartfelt "Eliminate Israel--Now!")

It's interesting that PH has changed its logo. It used to be a flag of Israel plus Gaza plus the West Bank, all covered in Arafatian checkers, thereby making its eliminationist mindset plain for all to see.

It now looks like this. No checks, but with a jaunty maple leaf to show how "Canadian" it is:

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Scaramouche is my nom de Web. My real name is Mindy G. Alter, and I like to think of myself as a free speecher with a sense of humour. My bailiwick: fighting on behalf of all the good things that free speech helps safeguard, and doing my utmost to highlight the malevolence and imbicilities of those who oppose freedom, whomever they may be.